Weird as hell’: the Covid-19 patients who

have symptoms for months

In mid-March Paul Garner developed what he thought was a “bit of a cough”. A
professor of infectious diseases, Garner was discussing the new coronavirus with
David Nabarro, the UK’s special envoy on the pandemic. At the end of the Zoom
call, Nabarro advised Garner to go home immediately and to self-isolate. Garner
did. He felt no more than a “little bit off”.

Days later, he found himself fighting a raging infection. It’s one he likens to being
“abused by somebody” or clubbed over the head with a cricket bat. “The
symptoms were weird as hell,” he says. They included loss of smell, heaviness,
malaise, tight chest and racing heart. At one point Garner thought he was about to
die. He tried to Google “fulminating myocarditis” but was too unwell to navigate
the screen.

Garner refers to himself wryly as a member of the “Boris Johnson herd

immunity group”. This is the cluster of patients who contracted Covid-19 in the 12
days before the UK finally locked down. He assumed his illness would swiftly
pass. Instead it went on and on – a rollercoaster of ill health, extreme emotions
and utter exhaustion, as he put it in a blog last week for the British Medical
Journal.

There is growing evidence that the virus causes a far greater array of symptoms
than was previously understood. And that its effects can be agonisingly
prolonged: in Garner’s case for more than seven weeks. The professor at the
Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine says his experience of Covid-19 featured a
new and disturbing symptom every day, akin to an “advent calendar”.

He had a muggy head, upset stomach, tinnitus, pins and needles, breathlessness,
dizziness and arthritis in the hands. Each time Garner thought he was getting
better the illness roared back. It was a sort of virus snakes and ladders. “It’s
deeply frustrating. A lot of people start doubting themselves,” he says. “Their
partners wonder if there is something psychologically wrong with them.”

Since his piece was published, Garner has received emails and tearful phone calls
from grateful readers who thought they were going mad. “I’m a public health
person,” he says. “The virus is certainly causing lots of immunological changes in
the body, lots of strange pathology that we don’t yet understand. This is a novel
disease. And an outrageous one. The textbooks haven’t been written.”
According to the latest research, about one in 20 Covid patients experience long-
term on-off symptoms. It’s unclear whether long-term means two months, or
three or longer. The best parallel is dengue fever, Garner suggests – a “ghastly”
viral infection of the lymph nodes which he also contracted. “Dengue comes and
goes. It’s like driving around with a handbrake on for six to nine months.”

Prof Tim Spector, of King’s College London, estimates that a small but significant
number of people are suffering from the “long tail” form of the virus. Spector is
head of the research group at King’s College London which has developed
the Covid-19 tracker app. This allows anyone who suspects they have the disease
to input their symptoms daily; some 3 to 4 million people are currently using it,
mostly Britons and Americans.

Spector estimates that about 200,000 of them are reporting symptoms which
have lasted for the duration of the study, which is six weeks. There is good clinical
data available for patients who end up in hospital. Thus far the government is not
collecting information on those in the community with ostensibly “mild” but often
debilitating symptoms – a larger group than those in critical care.

“These people may be going back to work and not performing at the top of their
game,” Spector says. “There is a whole other side to the virus which has not had
attention because of the idea that ‘if you are not dead you are fine.’”

He adds: “We are the country that invented epidemiology. We haven’t produced
any epidemiological studies other than the app. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

As more information becomes available, the government’s Covid model seems

increasingly out of date. Many Covid patients do not develop a fever and cough.
Instead they get muscle ache, a sore throat and headache. The app has tracked 15
different types of symptoms, together with a distinct pattern of “waxing and
waning”. “I’ve studied 100 diseases. Covid is the strangest one I have seen in my
medical career,” Spector says.

Scientific explanations for what is happening are still at an early stage. Lynne
Turner-Stokes, professor of rehabilitation medicine at King’s College, says Covid
is a “multi-system disease” which can potentially affect any organ. It causes
microvascular problems and clots. Lungs, brain, skin, kidneys and the nervous
system may be affected. Neurological symptoms can be mild (headache) or severe
(confusion, delirium, coma).

Turner-Stokes says it’s uncertain why the illness is sometimes so protracted. One
explanation is that the body’s immune system goes into overdrive, with an
ongoing reaction. Another is that the symptoms are virus-driven. Either way, she
says there can be a “recrudescence of symptomatology”. Or, as she also puts it
using more colloquial language, “the whole caboodle comes back”.

Researchers are now collaborating across borders. They are examining the latest
data from European countries ahead of the UK in pandemic terms, such as Italy
and Spain, as well as China. They are seeking to work out what support may be
needed for severe and chronic patients, with Covid posing similar challenges to
HIV/Aids a generation ago.

Meanwhile Covid “long-termers” have been comparing notes via a Slack support
group. It has #60plus-days and #30plus-days chat groups. The dominant feeling
is relief that others are in the same grim situation, and that their health problems
are not imaginary.

This article is about the weird on and off symptoms that are caused by the Coronavirus and also
leave psychological complaints. Many people think they’re losing their minds and getting crazy.
They also say that some people don’t suffer physically but only mentally but people don’t look
up for that because they’re still alive.

Difficult words

1. Raging  woedend

2. Clubbed  geknuppeld

3. Malaise  algehele staat van ongemak, vermoeidheid, of ziekte aan te duiden

4. Fulminating myocarditis  clinische aandoening

5. Utter  volslagen

6. Agonizingly  pijnlijk

7. Tinnitus  oorsuizen

8. Lymph nodes lymfeklieren

9. Debilitating slopend

10. Protracted  langdurig

‘it eats him alive inside’: Trump’s latest attack shows endless
obsession with Obama.
President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump once sat together in
the Oval Office. “I was immediately struck by Trump’s body language,”
wrote journalist Jon Karl in his memoir Front Row at The Trump Show. “I was
seeing a side of him I had never seen. He seemed, believe it or not, humbled.”

It was November 2016 and, just for once, Trump was not in charge of the room,
Karl recalls. Obama was still president, directing the action and setting the tone.
His successor “seemed a little dazed” and “a little freaked out”. What the two men
discussed in their meeting that day, only they know.

But what became clear in the next three and a half years is that Obama remains
something of an obsession for Trump; the subject of a political and personal
inferiority complex.

Observers point to a mix of anti-intellectualism, racism, vengeance and primitive

envy over everything from Obama’s Nobel peace prize to the scale of his
inauguration crowd and social media following.

Ben Rhodes, a former Obama national security aide, tweeted this week: “Trump’s

fact-free fixation on Obama dating back to birtherism is so absurd and stupid that
it would be comic if it wasn’t so tragic.”

“Birtherism” was a conspiracy theory that Trump started pushing in 2011 (“He

doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one but there is something on that
birth certificate – maybe religion, maybe it says he’s a Muslim, I don’t know.”) .
Nine years later, he has come full circle with “Obamagate”, which accuses his
predecessor of working in league with the “deep state” to frame Trump for
colluding with Russia to win the 2016 election.

There is zero evidence for this claim. Indeed, a case could be made that the
supposed “deep state” did more to help Trump than hurt him when the FBI
reopened an investigation into his opponent, Hillary Clinton, just before election
day. When questioned by reporters, Trump himself has struggled to articulate
what “Obamagate” means. Ned Price, a former CIA analyst, dubbed it “a hashtag
in search of a scandal”.

But his allies in the Republican party and conservative media are stepping up to
build a parallel universe where this is the big story and Obama is at the center of
it. Sean Hannity, a host on Fox News, demanded: “What did Barack Obama know
and when did he know it?” Over the past week, the channel’s primetime
shows have devoted more coverage to the bogus crimes of “Barack Hussein
Obama” than to the coronavirus pandemic – and Trump’s mishandling of it.
Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill,
said: “Donald Trump always need a foil. This riles up his base because they cling
to anything that diverges responsibility for anything from Donald Trump over to
someone else. And in this case Barack Obama is the boogeyman of the month.”

Beyond political expediency, there is a more profound antipathy at work. From

the Iran nuclear deal to the Trans Pacific Partnership, from environmental
regulations to the Affordable Care Act, Trump has always seemed to be on a
mission to erase his predecessor’s legacy. With few deep convictions of his own,
Obama became a negative reference point for Trump. Between 22 November
2010 and 14 May 2020, he tweeted about Obama 2,933 times, according to
the Trump Twitter Archive.

There are a few reasons, argues Setmayer, host of the Honestly Speaking

podcast. “First off, Donald Trump has a problem where I think he’s just jealous of
the fact that President Obama is still so admired. Number two, I think he has a
problem with people of color who are in authority that don’t do the kind of song
and dance that he wants them to do.

“Barack Obama is not a ‘shuck and jive’ person of color, and those are the kinds of
people that Donald Trump seems to be attracted to if you look at who he
surrounds himself with as far as minorities are concerned.”

Third, Setmayer points to the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association

dinner, where Trump sat stony-faced and humiliated as Obama lampooned the
Celebrity Apprentice host’s nascent political ambitions. Obama even pointed to a
photoshopped image of a Trump White House with hotel, casino, golf course and
gold columns.

“A lot of people think that this is where this all started,” Setmayer continued.
“President Trump does not have a sense of humor, he’s not self-deprecating, and
the White House correspondents’ dinner is a fun event where people make fun of
each other, especially in politics.”

Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, a civil rights advocacy group,

said: “This obsession, of course, is absolutely rooted in racism. Some of the
accusations have been deeply racialized, from the questioning of Obama’s
intelligence to talking about how much basketball he plays to questioning his
birthplace and citizenship.”

Trump has shredded many norms, including that of presidents maintaining a

respectful contact with their predecessors. He has dismissed the idea of seeking
Obama’s input during the coronavirus pandemic. For his part, Obama has
carefully chosen his moments to condemn certain decisions or policies without
mentioning Trump by name.

But tensions flared last week when a tape leaked of Obama on a private
conference call with about 3,000 alumni of his administration, describing
Trump’s leadership in the pandemic as “an absolute chaotic disaster”. He also
warned a justice department move to drop charges against Trump’s former
national security adviser Michael Flynn, who admitted lying to the FBI about his
conversations with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition,
indicates that “the rule of law is at risk”.

Trump has described Flynn as a wronged “hero” and argued that Obama and his
vice-president, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for November’s
election, should “pay a big price” for supposedly derailing the retired general’s
career. Critics suggest that the president is seeking to weaponise the justice
department for electoral gain.

Matthew Miller, a former director of the office of public affairs at the department,
said: “In terms of any real action against Barack Obama, he obviously doesn’t
have anything to worry about. But when you look at what’s happened at the
justice department with the complete politicisation of that department, I think it’s
quite possible that they’re going to be coming after people from the Obama
administration, using the criminal justice process any way they can.”

It would be one of the gravest consequences of Trump’s Obama obsession. Miller

added: “There’s some racism there but, most of all, it’s driven by the fact that
Obama has the thing that Trump has always craved but never achieved, and that’s
respect. I’ve always thought that the respect that Barack Obama gets from people
in this country and around the world is something that just eats Trump alive
inside.”

Obama issued a tweet on Thursday that contained one word: “Vote.” He is

expected to campaign vigorously for Biden, wooing voters who crave a return to
what they saw as the dignity and stability of his era. But his presence is also likely
to be inverted by Trump to rally his base with dark warnings that, like Clinton
before him, Biden would effectively represent a third term of Obama. The 2016
rally chants of “Lock her up!” might be replaced by “Lock him up!”

The 2020 election could yet turn into a final showdown between Obama and
Trump, even if only one of their names is on the ballot.
It will be a clash of opposites: one a mixed-race cerebral lawyer who has been
married to the same woman for nearly three decades and publishes annual lists of
his favorite books; the other a white billionaire and reality TV star who wed three
times and measures success in TV ratings. Where one is renowned for elegant
turns of phrase and shedding tears after mass shootings, the other serves up
jumbled word salads and schoolboy spelling errors and has struggled to show
empathy for the coronavirus dead.

Michael D’Antonio, a political commentator and author of The Truth About

Trump, said: “There’s so much that separates them, it’s hard to imagine two
presidents more different. It’s very obvious Trump is continually comparing
himself with Obama in his own mind. Obama’s over his head, over his shoulder,
always looming as the guy who could speak in paragraphs and juggle more than
one thing at once and deal with them effectively.”

The law obliges platforms and search engines to remove offensive content –
incitement to hate or violence and racist or religious bigotry – within 24 hours or
risk a fine of up to €1.25m.

and private grain traders as well as food producers were urged to procure higher
volumes of soybeans, soy oil and corn during calls with China’s Ministry of
Commerce in recent days, three trade sources told Reuters.

Barack Obama attacks Trump administration’s response to pandemic

Barack Obama attacked the Trump administration’s response to the Covid-19

pandemic during a speech on Saturday. The comments are a rare rebuke of a
sitting president from one of his predecessors, and come in the midst of a
pandemic that has had devastating and disproportionate effects on communities
of colour in the United States.

This article is about the fact that President Trump is and always has been giving critics to
Obama, but we think it’s because he is jealous that Obama is still loved and that Trump believes
that people of color shouldn’t have power.

Difficult words:

1. Humbled  vernederd

2. Inferiority complex  minderwaardigheidscomplex

 3. Vengeance  wraak

4. Conspiracy samenzwering

5. Predecessor  voorganger

6. Lampooned  publiekelijke kritiek dmv ironie of sarcasme

7. Accusations  beschuldigingen

8. Derailing  ontsporen

9. Cerebral  cerebraal

10. Bigotry onverdraagzaamheid

America’s corporate elite must stop treating

coronavirus as an obstacle to profit
It’s up to CEOs to rise above their arrogance and place the health of
their workers before revenues
As America reopens for business, you might expect Jeff Bezos, the richest man in
America, and his Amazon corporation, the most profitable corporation in
America, to set the standard for how to protect the health of American workers.

Think again.

Amazon’s warehouses have become Covid-19 hot spots, yet Amazon has

repeatedly fired workers who sound the alarm – including, just recently, a
warehouse worker in Minnesota who spoke out against unsafe conditions, and,
earlier in the pandemic, a worker who led a walkout at Amazon’s huge JFK8
warehouse in Staten Island after several employees tested positive for the virus.

A few weeks ago, Amazon fired two white-collar employees after they criticized

the company’s treatment of warehouse workers. I talked with one of them, Maren
Costa, at a virtual rally. (The event didn’t come off quite as planned. After
thousands of employees had RSVP’d, Amazon deleted all invitations and emails
regarding the event, according to organizers.)
“Why is Amazon so scared of workers talking with each other?” Costa wondered.
“We’re all in this together. No company should punish their employees for
showing concern for one another, especially during a pandemic.”

At Amazon’s AVP1 fulfillment center near Hazleton, Pennsylvania – under federal

investigation because of an early surge in cases – workers say Amazon stopped
sharing information about Covid-19 cases, so they started their own unofficial
tally, which at last count was 64 and rising.

“Plain truth: no one cares about us,” one of them told the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Another pointed to lack of enforcement of health and safety regulations. “Believe
me – we’ve complained and complained and complained,” the worker said.

Amazon doesn’t even provide hourly workers paid sick leave. It had allowed
warehouse workers with pre-existing conditions to take leave without pay if they
feared infection, but that policy expired last Thursday.

The company now says anyone who doesn’t return to work will be fired, and
it’s about to eliminate an extra $2 per hour hazard pay it had given warehouse
workers.

Why have Bezos and Amazon set the bar so low for the rest of corporate America?
It can’t be the cost. Amazon can afford the highest safety standards in the world.
Last quarter, its revenue surged 26% and its profits soared to $75.5bn. Since
March, Jeff Bezos’ net worth has jumped $24bn.

So, what is it? Perhaps it’s the arrogance and indifference that comes with
extraordinary power.

Consider billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who last week reopened

his Tesla plant despite county public-health orders to keep it shut. After Musk
threatened to sue the county and move the factory and jobs to another state,
officials finally caved.

Tesla promptly notified workers that “once you are called back, you will no longer
be on furlough so if you choose not to work, it may impact your unemployment
benefits”.

So Tesla workers are now being forced to choose between their livelihoods or,
possibly, their lives. Musk says his factory is safe, but a worker who returned to
the production line told the New York Times that little has changed, and “it’s hard
to avoid coming within six feet of others”.
Why is Musk so intent on risking lives? It can’t be the money. Musk is rolling in it.
Tesla’s stock closed at $790.96 a share last Wednesday, which put the company’s
value at about $146bn (by contrast, GM, which produces far more cars, is valued
at less than $31bn).

It’s that, like Bezos, Musk wants to impose his will on the world. The pandemic is
an obstacle, so it must be ignored.

In January, Musk said Covid-19 was nothing more than a common cold. In
March, he tweeted the “coronavirus panic is dumb”. By late late-April he was
calling shelter-in-place orders “fascist”, and asserting that health officials were
“breaking people’s freedoms”.

If all this reminds you of someone who now occupies the Oval Office, that’s no
coincidence. Musk’s thin-skinned, petulant narcissism bears an uncanny
resemblance to that of Donald Trump, who last week tweeted, “California should
let Tesla and @elonmusk open the plant, NOW.”

As someone who once oversaw the Occupational Safety and Health

Administration, I can attest that Trump’s OSHA is doing squat about worker
safety in this pandemic. Trump is fine with this. All he cares about is being re-
elected.

Trump despises Bezos, presumably because Bezos also owns the Washington
Post, which has been critical of Trump. But it’s easy to see in Bezos the same
public-be-damned bullying that emanates from the White House.

Enough! Those in power must stop seeing the pandemic as an obstacle to

personal ambition. Over 300,000 people around the world have lost their lives in
just four months, including more than 88,000 in America. Bezos, Musk, Trump,
and all others in positions to help contain this disaster are morally bound to do
so, their own ambitions be damned.

This article is about that people in higher positions and people with worldwide businesses use
Covid-19 as a boost for their income and don’t take good care for their employees.
Difficult words:
1. Corporation  bedrijf
2. Occupational  beroeps
3. Inquirer  informant
4. Entrepreneur  ondernemer
5. Presumably vermoedelijk
Split classes, outdoor lessons: what
Denmark can teach England about
reopening schools after Covid-19
In the week leading up to the reopening of Denmark’s schools a month ago, Dorte
Lange spent a lot of time on Skype. The vice-president of the Danish Union of
Teachers was responsible for detailed negotiations with the education minister,
the health authorities and other teaching unions. The aim was to make sure that
everyone was happy with the safety measures put in place to ensure an orderly
return of younger pupils to classrooms on 15 April.

“As unions, we were taken so much into account and we were consulted so much
that we felt quite safe about this,” Lange says. “We said to our members that we
think that we can actually trust the authorities and that it will be OK to go back.”

The Danish transition from lockdown to a reopening of schools has become the

go-to model for Boris Johnson’s government as it seeks to coax teachers and
unions into going back to work from next month.

“Schools have started to return in Denmark and have not seen a negative impact
as a result of that,” the secretary of state for education, Gavin Williamson, told
unions last week. “This has reconfirmed this approach is the right approach.”

And, indeed, it has been – for Denmark. But does that mean it is necessarily the
right one for Britain? Lange says: “The situation in society and with Covid-19 is
totally different [in the two countries]. If you, in general, have the experience that
you can trust the government and the authorities, then you are more likely to do
so.”

The Danish reopening has, so far, been smooth. The country’s R number rose
briefly in the two weeks after pupils up to the age of 11 returned, creeping up from
0.7 to 0.9, but it has since fallen back. On Friday, the country passed a major
milestone: the first day without a death from coronavirus since March. There
were just 137 people being treated in hospital for coronavirus.

The reopening of schools – which has seen classes split in two to keep two metres
between each child, more lessons taught outside and a rigorous hand-sanitising
regime – has not led to a spike in cases among staff. “We have seen very few
incidents where teachers have become ill with coronavirus,” Lange says.
But as well as being one of the first countries to reopen schools, Denmark was
also one of the first to close them, with its prime minister, Mette Frederiksen,
imposing a lockdown at least a week ahead of the UK.

On 13 March, the day the Cheltenham Festival drew nearly 70,000 people,
Denmark closed its borders. It had ordered schools to close two days earlier, and
on 17 March, it closed restaurants, bars and most shops, limiting gatherings to 10
people. So, by the time primary schools reopened, the pandemic was already
under control, with 200 people being treated in intensive care with coronavirus –
about 3.5 for every 100,000 citizens.

There is also a sharp contrast between the acrimonious handling of the

negotiations in the UK and those that were held by Lange and others. While the
UK government has been wary of sharing the scientific advice it receives, the
process in Denmark began with the publication of a report from the country’s
infectious diseases agency, SSI. This modelled the likely effect of reopening, based
on the assumptions that children spread the infection at the same rate as adults
and have no ability to socially distance.

SSI concluded that, although the R number would increase, this was likely to lead
to only 264 coronavirus patients in intensive care at any one time.

Teachers’ unions accepted SSI’s conclusions and used them as the basis for the
negotiations over guidelines. “We’re not scientists, we’re not professors of
epidemiology, so we don’t know anything about that. We have to trust the
authorities,” Lange says, adding, however, that she doesn’t blame her British
counterparts for acting in the way they have.

On Friday, she had another Skype call with Denmark’s education minister. This
time, it was partly about the return of older pupils tomorrow, which will mean a
return to more crowded classrooms. But it was also about how to retain some of
the positive aspects of the school regime of the past month.

“We can see now very clearly that smaller groups bring a higher degree of
wellbeing for the kids, and give the teachers more contact with the kids during the
day,” Lange says.

“We are looking at whether we can continue that, and maybe shorten our school
day a bit, with fewer lessons but with a higher degree of contact with students.”

This article is about how Denmark reopened the schools and how well it goes and how they
listen to the rules about distance. It also shows what other country’s can learn from Denmark.
Difficult words:

1. Negotiations  onderhandelingen

2. Authorities autoriteiten

3. Rigorous  streng

4. Acrimonious  scherp

5. Retain  behouden